THE APOSTLE OF THE NEW RIGHT

JD Vance has proven himself the kind of loyalist for whom nothing exists but the loyalty, with his actions regarding the lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. There seems to be something missing inside Vance, something that being Trump’s vice president fills.

You can see it the way his chest puffs out, the way he tries to look tough for a minute before a smile breaks in his response to rally crowds. You can see this reaction over and over again in his love of the response to his “money lines.” He gets filled with the glory of the moment, the crowd’s response giving him such a powerful affirmation for his work as Trump’s attack dog, to the point it seems to be its own reward.

When one considers Vance’s effort to spread the racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, continuing the spew the lies despite numerous fact checks, with the Wall Street Journal, documenting that Vance and his campaign knew from the outset what they were saying was a lie that they went on to spread anyway, that’s all the proof needed of Trump’s genius in choosing Vance: Corporal Six Months In An Air-Conditioned Trailer is a man for whom no lie is to brazen, no attack too low, no step too far in his pursuit of Eminence.

It turns out Vance may be even more broken as a human being than Trump is. A review of how he got where he is demonstrates he is someone who will do anything to achieve the eminence and power he believes he has been denied since birth.

There is irony in the fact that - on the one hand - Vance is a card-carrying member of the upper echelon of America’s ruling elite: Yale Law School graduate, New York Times best-selling author, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, United States senator. And on the other hand, he is now a vociferous conservative critic of that ruling elite, as the Tribune of disaffected Middle Americans/ It’s a role he claims by virtue of his birth in eastern Appalacia, his familys problems as documented in his book, by his upbringing in post-industrial Ohio. He said, “It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism,” in one of his first major interviews following publication of “Hillbilly Elegy.”

But how populist can he really be, cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley? How does a Yalie attorney and former venture capitalist understand the lives of Trump’s blue-collar voters? This is a guy who owns two million-dollar houses and claims to be a credible advocate for the GOP’s economic populism?

Vance is a particularly good example of the kind of “empty person” who is attracted to authoritarian movements in the belief their true genius will be recognized therein. This is a familiar trope for some of the worst individuals who became involved with Stalinist Communism, Nazism and Fascism. Bernardo Bertolucci gave us a portrait of this kind of person in his film “The Conformist.”

What has been relatively unknown in contermporary politics is that Vance comes from what is now referred to as “The New Right.” For those unaware of this phenomenon, The New Right is a new movement advocating an illiberal and explicitly reactionary political order. While it uses the rhetoric of conservate populism, it is fundamentally elitist. Its goal is to replace the current ruling elite with a new, more conservative one - drawn of course from the ranks of the New Right.

Who are these people? Elon Musk is one, so is Peter Thiel. Also Marc Andreessen, as well as other Silly Con Valley Bros who believe their success demonstrates their worthiness to run more than a computer company. The goal is a to find someone who can lead a right-wing populist movement to political power, then carry out a top-down transformation of American society into an illiberal social order built around conservative values, even if those values remain broadly unpopular with the American people.

Consider that Trump is 78, in poor physical health and obviously “losing it” in terms of mental competence. Should he win re-election, he is unlikely to complete the term, either dying outright or being removed for failure of mental competency under the 25th Amendment.

Which would thus push JD Vance into the White House. Where he could reorganize the cabinet and bring in his New Right allies, installing them in the positions of power that would allow them to institute this plan.

In a 2023 interview, Vance said , “One of the ways in which I’m very much populist is that I think people need to have elected representatives who try to channel their frustrations into solutions that will make their lives better. One of the ways I’m very much not a populist is that I think every populist movement that has ever existed has failed unless it’s captured some subset of the people who are professionally in government. You can’t just run a political movement purely with voters — you need voters, you need bureaucrats, you need lawyers, you need business leaders, you need the whole thing.”

For those who were surprised - given his past criticisms of Trump - by his new-found belief in Trumpism and the MAGA movement, what he did in accepting the vice presidential nomination has been chalked up to either moral collapse or rank opportunism. But considered in light of the ideas presented in the writings of the New Right intellectuals close to Vance, it looks a lot like the first step in their much larger plan.

Patrick Deneen, a New Right Catholic philosopher and political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, has written two influential books that promote the ideas of the New Right.

In the 2018 book “Why Liberalism Failed,” that first got him noticed, he argued that small-L liberalism is inevitably self-destructive; that a political system based on expansion of individual rights and autonomy will inevitably undermine the traditional family, organized religion and local communities - the collective institutions that make political life possible.

In his 2023 book, “Regime Change,” Deneen lays out his vision of an ideal “post-liberal order” that drops liberalism’s protection of individual rights in favor of a social order that promotes “the common good;” this is a purportedly objective set of social conditions that “undergird human flourishing,” which is borrowed from Catholic social teaching. In this analysis the phony commitment of liberalism to egalitarianism gives cover to a corrupt - left-leaning - elite pursuing its own interests, at the expense of the interests of the downtrodden - right-leaning - masses. In this post-liberal social order, a new ruling elite will promote collaboration between “the few” (the New Right) and “the many” in pursuit of “the common good,” in a system governed by the same institutions, infused by a “fundamentally different ethos.” This would include aggressive trust-busting of corporate monopolies; a robust “pro-family” welfare policy to promote the formation of traditional families; strict limits on abortion; and limits on LGBTQ+ rights.

The major point is Deneen’s plan for transition from the liberal order to the postliberal order, which would require the creation of “a new elite” — a “self-conscious aristocracy” as he puts it - who could enter government, academia and the media, take them over and repurpose them to serve conservative and illiberal ends. Having replaced the old, corrupt liberal elite, the new elite would ally with and rule in the interests of the “many,” using their power to foster conservative values like “stability, order and continuity.” Deneen’s term for this is “aristopopulism” which — an alliance between a “genuinely noble elite” and the populist masses, who would together replace secular liberalism with a postliberal system based on a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.”

Even a casual study of the past 150 years of social change led by “leading forces” - what ended up being called Communism and Nazism - is a good guide to what happens when those in the “leading force” take power.

Vance supports Deneen’s ideas. When he participated in a panel discussion at the launch for “Regime Change,” Vance identified himself as a member of the “post-liberal right,” and said he “sees my role and my voice” in Congress as “explicitly anti-regime.” Significantly, he appeared at this event alongside Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts - the man responsible for Project 2025. Asked how he balances the interests of “the few” and “the many” in practice, Vance answered, “Things in American society are so tilted toward the ‘few’ that I just focus on the ‘many,’ and let the rest of it figure itself out.”

Vance’s suggestion that Trump should ignore the Supreme Court if they step in to block the mass firings called for in Project 2025 is the kind of move that the New Right advocates.

All of this is clear when considering the thinking of Vance’s primary political patron and close personal friend Peter Thiel, who Vance met in 2011 at a talk by Thiel at Yale Law School, which Vance later called “the most important moment of my time at Yale.”

Vance later worked for Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital and then founded his own fund with Thiel’s backing. Along the way, Thiel became a tutor to Vance, introducing him to the intellectual influencers shaping the politics of Silicon Valley’s right-leaning Bros

For the record, Thiel has said that “democracy” no longer supports “freedom,” and that allowing women to vote is why the conservatives he supports lose elections. He’s right about that, women are doing a great job of sending people like him back to mommie’s basement. Of course, he believes the 19th Amendment should be overturned.

For Thiel and the rest of the Silly Con Valley Retrogressives, “real political freedom” requires shrinking and eventually abolishing the centralized political state, replacing it with an “anarcho-capitalist” system governed exclusively by markets and social competition - a stateless techno-libertarian paradise in which the only rights are property rights. Under this new order, a “natural elite” - people like Thiel, Musk and Andreessen - would inevitably rise to the top. According to Thiel & Co., democracy existed to protect markets; once it ceased to do that, it is now expendable..

Vance and the people who have worked to put him where he is are united by their opposition to liberal democracy and their fundamental elitism - their belief America is and always will be run by elites, but is currently ruled by the wrong kind of elite. They recognize their ideas are not sufficiently popular to win broad-based political support; thus they propose an alliance between reactionary elites and the alienated masses, channeling popular frustration against the democratic order they hope to eventually replace.

This is only different from Leninism in how the new rulers will initiate the “dictatorship of the proletariat” andwhat it will look like.

The New Right is committed to identifying and cultivating that new conservative elite. Idiots like Charlie Kirk - who is probably not a current member - take their money to set up organizations like Turning Points Action to attract the future “elite” for recruitment.

This new elite will be made up of people who are steeped in elite culture and reactionary ideas, but who “understand the people” and can credibly claim to govern on their behalf.

In other words, they will look like JD Vance. As he said in an earlier interview, “Maybe the most important role that I have to play from the New Right’s perspective is to help build institutions and to get people engaged in politics who weren’t previously engaged in politics. It’s definitely an interesting thing, but it’s going to take a long time.”

Perhaps not that long if Trump and Vance win in November.

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